The Ambivalent Power of Reproduction: Josef Sudek’s Postcards
Historically considered mere commercial and tourist products, picture postcards occupy the space of the neither/nor: neither as art nor as “real” photography due to their mass production and subject matter. In recent years, within the critical frameworks of visual culture studies and theoretical emphases on visuality and popular culture, postcards are beginning to receive critical attention as cultural artifacts that mediate deeply contested ideologies and circulate sites and artifacts as vehicles of power and propaganda (including Jonathan Crary, Andrew Roberts and Mark Simpson). Examining a collection of previously undocumented postcards from Czech photographer, Josef Sudek (1894 –1976), commissioned for a variety of clients (including private individuals, businesses and the Czechoslovakian government), this paper explores postcard images as carriers of complex, often ambivalent and paradoxical discourses on the role of reproduction in art and photography, competing narratives of modernity and nationalistic propaganda. Drawing upon cultural theorist Walter Benjamin’s writings on the ‘work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ and Homi K. Bhabha’s works on the problematics of cultural identity and visual culture scholarship critically investigating the ways ideologies circulate within mass culture through imagery, this paper demonstrates how postcard images challenge us to rethink art’s relation to commerce, culture, and power.
Amy Hughes is a Fulbright Fellow at the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences researching the affective politics of dissent in monumental postwar public glass sculptures in Communist Czechoslovakia. She studies twentieth-century Central European art, design and visual culture, particularly postwar Czech glass, photography and performance-based installations. She has also published on Josef Sudek’s Sad Landscapes series (ed. Belden-Adams, 2017). A doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she received her M.A. from the Bard Graduate Center (NYC), where she worked as a research assistant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC). Prior to commencing graduate studies, she taught art history in Paris.